John Good Selects Infigo Software’s Catfish Platform As Foundation For Major Digital Print Investment

Publishing specialists John Good Limited has selected Catfish MegaEdit from Infigo Software Limited as part of a £500,000 investment into digital services.

To support Catfish, John Good has secured a Kodak Nexpress SX2700 with its wide range of digital finishes together with a Duplo 646PRO fully automated multi-finisher and a iSaddle stitching system. Installation will be completed in March.

The investment programme will enhance John Good’s digital services for its 2,000 existing clients and enable the company to expand its offering to smaller organisations. Current clients include 300 individual theatres including those in London’s West End and theatre companies across the UK. The company plans to use Catfish MegaEdit and the new digital equipment to streamline and develop its current output of more than four million theatre programmes each year.

David Fatkin, director - digital at John Good, explains: “Initially, we were looking for a web-to-print system for existing customers to view and edit their publications, particularly theatre programmes, online.

“Catfish is certainly very well suited for this but, working with the Catfish Applications Programming Interface (API), we are able to build our own online applications to promote the activities of other related business units within the firm, advertising in particular."

John Good intends to launch its own online advertising portal by the end of 2015. The portal will be designed to feature advertising opportunities within hundreds of arts and non-arts related publications from across the UK. Working with the Catfish API, John Good will be able to offer existing and potential clients a simple, intelligent search facility and a dynamic view of advertising opportunities available within the physical and interactive digital publications published.

The first phase of digital expansion will be to offer a basic web-to-print service for theatre programmes alongside items such as postcards, leaflets, compliment slips and booklets. The second phase of the Catfish development will be to deliver a dynamic advertising portal later in the year.

David continues: “Catfish MegaEdit is perfect for the portal and goes way beyond just web-to-print. The portal will showcase the full range of advertising opportunities across all publications, enabling customers to search for opportunities by various pre-defined criteria, including size of venue, audience type, location, etc. then review and secure suitable placements.”

Theatre programmes are currently printed on John Good’s Litho machines with a minimum run of around 800. With Catfish and the new digital printing equipment, significantly lower volumes will become economically viable, allowing sales to expand into smaller theatre venues.

Simon McKay, operations director at John Good, said: “Catfish enables us to streamline our digital print capability and extend our services to personalised, or ‘special edition’ publications. For example, we can create templates for a pantomime programme, such as Cinderella or Dick Wittington, which can be tailored online, using our own library of artwork and themes, to the needs of smaller venues.”

Simon adds: “One of the big benefits of Catfish is that it will support our internal systems. Catfish will integrate directly with our management information and printing software systems, allowing the intelligent routing of jobs to digital or litho machines automatically.”